


The Kiel Cadenza

by Aphoride



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: All The Chapter Titles Are Bond Films, Bathilda ships it, Drama, Historical AU, M/M, Mixed-Race Dumbledores, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Romance, Star-crossed romance, Telegrams, There will be murder, just for fun, self-indulgent as fuck, spy AU, too much drama
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:49:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23948692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aphoride/pseuds/Aphoride
Summary: It is 1905 and the British-German naval arms race is full steam ahead. Britain are winning - they are developing a weapon which will transform the race entirely and keep mastery of the seas in British hands. Germany is hunting for a rebuttal - and what better way, what easier way than to steal the Dreadnought plans from under British noses and scupper the ship before she can be built?The British Ministry of Magic lends its best agent, Albus Dumbledore, to His Majesty's Government to counteract the threat of German magical agents sent from Berlin. His brief is simple: protect the Dreadnought, at all costs.Germany have their own weapons up their sleeve, but it seems they may not need them when Albus' head is turned by a chance meeting at his former professor's garden party with a student named Gellert Grindelwald, over in England on a year abroad from Heidelberg university.It's a perfectly charming whirlwind romance - at least, at first.
Relationships: Albus Dumbledore/Gellert Grindelwald
Comments: 9
Kudos: 20





	1. On His Majesty's Secret Service

On His Majesty’s Secret Service

URGENT STOP TO MY DEAR FRIEND GEORGE STOP HAVE LEARNED THAT A NEW FRIEND IS VISITING LONDON SHORTLY STOP PLANS TO TAKE LUNCH AT THE ADMIRALTY STOP THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO INVITE HIM FOR TEA STOP WILL LET YOU KNOW WHEN I HAVE MORE NEWS STOP YOURS STOP R

Date: 18 SEPTEMBER 1905

Time Received: 2303 HOURS

To: WHITEHALL, LONDON

From: [REDACTED]

Translation: BERLIN ARE SENDING A NEW AGENT TO LONDON WITH INSTRUCTION TO STEAL THE DREADNOUGHT PLANS. OUR MAN WILL SEND MORE INFORMATION AS HE CAN FIND IT.

PASS TO CABINET FOR EXAMINATION IMMEDIATELY. NO RESPONSE REQUIRED.

* * *

19 SEPTEMBER 1905 AT 1400 HOURS

The blackbird hopped, once then twice, along the branch; it’s head tilted with a quick jerk, beady eye looking back at him – then, it skidded and hopped and soared over to rest on the top of a tombstone, upright and moss-eaten, the name chipped into it worn down over time.

He watched it go, watched it chirp a fast, bright song; heard it’s neck snap with a sharp crack, saw it vanish in a puff of falling black feathers, yellow beak trailing on the ground as the cat dragged it away.

He blinked and the bird was still there, looking at him, beak half-open in a pointed-soft smile.

It was quiet – as it was meant to be; as he had expected it to be – devoid of the rushing hushing of motorcars and omnibuses, students walking with clip-clopping shoes and the rustle of papers stuffed under their arms ruffled by the wind as they went. There was only the breeze through the trees, a soft, sighing thing, and the birds; a solitary cat, ginger and tabby-patterned, prowled through the bushes by the old stone walls, tail flicking up and down as it spied, searching for an opening.

With a sigh, he meandered through the graveyard, dipping out of a row here and into another there, following a row all the way to the end and the high, rough-cut stone wall, grey and moss-drenched; his hands, ungloved, trailed over the tops as though touching shoulders, a thin layer of brown-black dirt imprinting into his fingertips, smudged and fine – like smoke, he thought, that famous London smog.

At the back of the cemetery, a young yew sapling grew out of amongst a patch of older, faded graves marked with carved crosses, broken arms littering the ground in stone crumbs around them. It was dim and cool in the shade, dappled green and the dew on the grass replaced by coalescing drops of rain; the low, flat tomb was damp when he sat on it, dyeing his trousers dark and spotted with brown.

From there, he could see the whole of it: how it stretched out, an army of the dead besieging the church, split only by the path that led up to the front doors; how it fanned out, lighter stone to darker from one side to another and inside-out; how it was a strangely lonely blot on the land, this patchwork landscape of fields and forests outside of the walls; how the church loomed in the near-distance, hovering over his head with a tall, squat threat, the bell-tower topped with battlements and plain, clock-less.

There was a weather-cock there, though, bronze tail winking at him as it caught the light; north-north-east, the wind.

There would be a storm soon – he could taste it on the back of his tongue, fizzing already and spiked electric.

Humming a soft melody to himself, he tipped his head back and stared up at the canopy of leaves overhead. They were small, yew leaves, long and slim with sharp, pointed needles: they reminded him of knives and wands, quick-drawn cuts from shrapnel, slivers of wood from a shattered staircase carpeting everything in a yellow-light layer of dust.

If he concentrated, if he relaxed and focused and pulled, pulled at that whisper at the back of his mind that spoke of mud and rain and new, polished stones in rows and rows and rows all gleaming white and neat, he would hear the bursting crack of a gunshot, see spools of blue material lying on the floor of a shop – turquoise, powder-blue, Prussian blue – feel his hand close around something metal and warm, beating with a pulse that wasn’t his, and –

He never stayed too long in there, never lingered – it hurt to be too zealous.

Even now, the sun, weak and clouded over as it was, tugged tears out of his eyes; he scrunched them closed, his mouth dry and his skin hot, hot, too hot. He wished he could take off his jacket, the waistcoat, his shirt even – sit there bare-skinned and feel cold again, shiver again with something other than fever.

He had not slept the night before, lying half-awake with the sheets tangled around his curled body, watched the moonlight flitter across the floor of his room in waves, counting down the seconds and the minutes and the hours until he would have to get up to Apparate to Freiburg for the portkey.

How had it been? _Six hours, forty-two minutes, thirty-one seconds; six hours, forty-two minutes, thirty-one seconds; sechs Uhr, zweiundvierzig Minuten, einsunddreizig Secunden._

At the soft, jaunty sounds of someone whistling, he looked up to see someone else entering the cemetery: a woman, dressed elegantly in a long, straight-cut dress, a hat tilted over one eye. She did not look at the tombs she passed as she made her way down towards the yew tree and his solitude; instead, she marched on with brisk, decided steps.

As she got closer he realised she was beautiful, a speck of a Parisian glamour in a small, run-down Cambridge graveyard: with her red-painted mouth, silk-slick dress in a deep bottle-green, and her arms full of stark, snow-white lilies, she did not belong there any more than he belonged.

She stopped in front of a gravestone, just out of reach of the yew tree’s shadow, her eyes fixed down as though reading the name engraved on it – _here lies_.

“Do you often sit in graveyards to stare at people, _monsieur_?” she asked him, calmly cold and direct. She did not look up at him; she did not yet put the flowers down.

“Why, should I not?” he replied, drawing a hand along the blunted edge of the grave he was still sitting on.

“People would think that kind of behaviour is rude,” she said, looking at him for the first time, her face inscrutable. She was not in mourning, then.

He only shrugged and smiled a bit, pulling one leg up so he lounged on the tombstone, leaning back onto a hand – she didn’t flinch so those people she had spoken about, those people who might be offended, did not include her.

Interesting and interesting.

“Those are very beautiful flowers,” he commented instead. “My _Tante_ grows tiger lilies in her back garden – she is trying to breed white-and-black ones, to call them Siberian, though they only seem to create pale orange.”

She watched him for a moment, statuesque as Medusa.

“My grandfather always preferred white lilies,” she said eventually, one corner of her lips quirking up in the smallest of smiles. “He claimed they reminded him of the moon.”

“How nice,” he smiled again, his heart thumping in his chest and his heartbeat thudding in his head. “But I must be going now, before anyone else comes along and thinks I am rude.”

With a swing of his legs, he slipped off the stone, a secretive sweep of his hand grasping as though pulling away a cloth to leave behind a blanket of jasmine flowers, creeping up from the ground to nest around the tomb, butter-yellow and bright against the shadow-cast grass.

As he passed her, he felt the gentlest brush of a spell, like a strong wind batting at his jacket, and the push down of something settling, cornered and paper-thin, in his pocket. He dipped a hand into his pocket once he was halfway back to _Tante_ Hilde’s house, rubbing the paper – and it was only paper, Muggle-type and fragile – between thumb and forefinger as he considered what would be the best way to shake off the beautifully cold French woman so he could redouble his efforts on his search.

After his victory in Delchevo, Bulgaria, he would need to be careful.

* * *

21 SEPTEMBER 1905 AT 1500 HOURS

The small house was bathed in a glaring, mid-afternoon sunshine, dyeing the wisteria curved around the arch of the doorframe a bright, fading lavender; it stood in sharp contrast to the bold red paint of the door underneath it – a kind of bus red, he thought, and matted from the wind and spattered rain – and the yellow petunias in spherical, green-glassed planters balanced precariously on the narrow steps down into the garden. Above it all, the white-and-black paint of the timber shone, chipped here and there and worn through to a duller, softer brown in places; the reflected light was bright enough that he squinted, lamenting the fact that he had not thought – nor wanted – to bring his glasses to a garden party.

Standing next to Professor Dippet – Master of Clare College and Professor of Herbology – and listening to Professor Beery ramble on about the merits or otherwise of cross-breeding honking daffodils with jonquil flowers, Albus was a little more aware than he should have been that the chilling charm on his glass of champagne was starting to wear off, leaving his hand growing damp and sticky in the warm. It was uncomfortable – every time he shifted his hand, however minutely, on the glass, it seemed to sink further into the tiny dips and ridges in the skin of his knuckles and palm – but he could not really think of an excuse to leave and go and wash his hands this early on in the party.

It would look rude, and he had known Bathilda Bagshot far too long to be rude at a party she was hosting, no matter how uncomfortable.

A sudden gust of laughter bubbled up from a group nearby – two men, four women; all of them academics he recognised from university meetings or lectures or parties much like this one – covering the music burbling out of the gramophone propped up on a wicker table over in the far corner, safely tucked under a small, cream-cotton canopy. The sound of it was faint, easily lost underneath the rising murmur of voices as more and more people arrived, popping out of the back door in spots of colour, red dresses and mustard suits and soft pink hats.

“– Albus, my boy? Albus?” Professor Dippet was looking at him through his round glasses, the golden rims flashing as he glanced up at Albus with the half-amused half-patient air he always had. “When was it you said you would be heading back to London? You mentioned something last time I saw you about heading to the British Library.”

“Oh, yes,” Albus nodded once; there was nothing quite like being caught out at not listening, even when the people you were ignoring didn’t really expect you to be listening. “I am intending to return this Sunday – of course, the library will not be open then, but I will be able to get in first thing Monday morning.”

“Ah, excellent,” Professor Beery smiled – a big, beaming sort of smile. It was the same smile he gave everyone; he was the kind of man who was incapable of smiling privately. “And how is the thesis coming along? Dragon’s liver, wasn’t it?”

“Dragon’s blood,” Albus corrected him. “At this stage, I am working purely theoretically – it is remarkably difficult to get hold of dragon’s blood to test through the usual channels, and quite understandably the university are not particularly inclined to grant my request to investigate in the labs, since I cannot yet say with much confidence what might be the results.”

Professor Beery laughed loudly at that, attracting more than a few glances their way; some lingered more than others and he tried not to note who it was who looked – the usual suspects, he knew, would always linger, lingering on his browning skin and his deep red hair, even now when it was cut short in the British style.

It stirred something in his stomach, acidic and barbed, and he swallowed hastily, trying not to look at them, not to see them at all.

“Perhaps we ought to meet when you are in London to discuss where might be suitable for your investigations,” Dippet said lightly, his still-full champagne glass tipping dangerously southward. “We may be able to come up with something.”

“Thank you, Professor,” Albus smiled, watching the first drops drip down the length of the glass, over the rim and round, onto the floor in a long, crystalline drop, drunk down by the grass. “Drop me an owl with a time convenient for you and I will adjust my schedule as necessary.”

“Ah, Armando, mind your champagne!” Professor Beery exclaimed, and Albus took the chance to add his glass to a growing pile of empty ones drifting past on a floating tray and excuse himself to go and wash his hands.

Inside the house, the air was cooler, even if not by much – with the windows all shut, the small breaths of breezes outside were kept outside the house, ghosting by the feathers in ladies’ hats instead – and the noise of the crowd in the garden was muffled quickly by the swing of the door as it shut behind him, and vanished completely as he entered the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

The cold water was a relief against his hands, sticky and clammy, and when he dipped his head to splash some water on his face, the smell of the soap, sharp and citrus, was strong and refreshing, clearing his head a little.

He supposed he should go back outside – find another glass, find Bathilda who so far he had only seen in glimpses at the party, vanishing between tall, bland-looking men and pretty, powdered women. It would not be for too long before people started leaving, and his thesis at least provided a good excuse for it – he could survive until then.

Another hour, he promised himself in the mirror, another hour and then he would be able to leave.

Drying his hands and face quickly with the towel, he unlocked the door, stepping out of the room and straight into another man waiting outside. Or, rather, into a man who was standing outside but facing the other way, peering round the corner with an intense theatricality.

He had the kind of stillness that was too still, tense and high-strung and wildly calm.

“Oh, sorry,” he said quickly, pulling his hands away from the other man’s waist and taking a step back. “I didn’t –”

“Hush,” the man in front of him whispered, holding up a hand with such authority Albus couldn’t help but stop talking. “Ah, scheiße!”

Albus knew very little German, but he knew enough to know what that meant – and then he had other concerns as the other man, blond and young and slim, had stepped back into him again, so they were, well, indecently close, locked together in the entrance way to the toilet.

The man was silent and Albus said nothing more but waited, absently thinking that the party was already far more interesting than they had ever been before: it felt almost electric, this hiding and skulking, as though he were up to something, as though they – he and this strange, still man – were up to something.

“I am sorry,” the man turned with a single, swift movement after a few moments had passed. “For inconveniencing you – I am trying to avoid my aunt.”

“I see,” Albus replied vaguely, suddenly aware that he was looking at the man and that if he was not careful it would very easily becoming staring and staring and staring and staring.

He was not intimidated by handsome men. He was not even besotted with handsome men – not in the way that some were, tripping over their own tongues and jagged pavements – and all he could think was that it was how close they were: close enough that he could pick out individual eyelashes, dark brown and long, and spy the beginning dip of shallow dimples as he spoke.

“ _Tante_ is determined to introduce me to all of her friends,” the man confided, looking up at him with a small, laughing smile. “And they are all very English and very boring.”

Albus laughed too, quiet and breathy – it was simpler to laugh, polite and friendly, even if it was a joke in poor taste and just as insulting, really, to him as it was to anyone else at the party.

“I am quite certain if you wanted to leave, you could find a pretty excuse,” he commented lightly – and when the other man laughed too, surprised and genuine and soft, throwing his head back with a little shake that shook his hair a bit more out of the hold of any gel he had put on it that morning.

“I am certain of that too, sir,” the other man murmured, tilting his chin down to look up through his eyelashes, deliberate and childishly coy – and something in Albus’ chest squirmed, like a cat trying to wriggle free from its owner’s swooping grip.

He stepped back, rocking on his heels into the bathroom doorway, slipping a hand inside his jacket pocket and focused – refocused, perhaps – on everything else around: the footsteps trailing through from the garden, heels clacking loudly on the wooden floorboards and the crisp, clay tiles in the kitchen; the silence, cool and sweet and turning rapidly sour as the blond watched him and he watched everything around the blond but him, as though he were a silhouetted figure, all in black and faceless, blank and void.

The light glinted through the open bathroom door, beaming and golden, catching on a thin, rippled chain around the other man’s neck: it was a delicate thing, made of tiny, looped links, but it was the pendant on the end of it, silver-spun and sleek, with the spoke – the Elder Wand – cast in rose-gold, that made all the hastily-constructed excuses, weak and dismissive, whisk out of his mind.

“Although,” he said and his voice sounded slow to his ears, slow compared to the thud-thud-thudding of his heart, quicker now and louder, bumping against his ribs in four-time. “If you are looking to escape, perhaps you should concentrate on searching for the Cloak – that would guarantee your not being found.”

The man’s eyes lit up – one light, one dark, but both bright now – and there was something secretive, conspiratorial even, about the way he regarded him now, with a serious sort of delight; it hung between them, a shared thing, something far more real and far more layered than the earlier coquetry.

“And to think,” Bathilda’s voice was amused and exasperated in equal measure, and when they both looked at her, she was glancing between them looking decidedly satisfied about something. “I was planning on introducing you! Clearly I needn’t have bothered. Like finds like, indeed!”

Albus did not know how to say that they had not actually been introduced, not when the other man was smiling sheepishly, spreading his hands as if to say, what can you do?

Bathilda, her hair tied back in a stiff, taut bun, shook her head and hurried back into the kitchen, her mouth still pinched in a tight, pleased smile, calling back over her shoulder, “don’t skulk inside the house all afternoon, Gellert, it will do you good to socialise some more!”

“I will not skulk, _Tante_ ,” the other man – Gellert, Albus thought, and the name sounded lyrical in his head; he wondered how it would feel on his tongue; Gellert, with the thick double-ell – smiled slyly and winked at Albus.

“Grindelwald,” he added a moment later. “That is… I am Gellert Grindelwald.”

“Albus Dumbledore,” Albus offered, holding out a hand to shake.

There was another laugh – bright and clear this time – and Gellert smiled again, his hand warm and his eyes dancing.

“I know,” Gellert told him casually. “Albus.”

* * *

21 SEPTEMBER 1905 AT 2100 HOURS

The door shut behind him with a brisk snap, leaving him momentarily smothered in the dark before, blinking, he flicked his wand with a hushed murmur and around the room, scattered candles sparked and puffed into life, flickering red then orange then rearing up tall and yellow-bodied, sputtering a half-hearted light over the small, beige room. It smelled of smoke now, the room, faint and thick, but it would fade soon enough.

Placing his suitcase by the desk, he went over to the window and reached a hand to reach side to draw the curtains closed, tugging them sharply, stiffly as though they were sticking to the rail; there was a steady stream of people passing below: a sea of bobbing bowler hats in black and sombre grey, and opposite, the building seemed empty enough, windows blank and left coldly curtain-less.

An office, then, likely.

To one side, further up the road, he could see the edge of the roundabout, a huge stone-paved thing carrying a statue of a king on horseback in the centre of it – the crowd of suited and booted men poured round the outside of the roundabout, looking left then right then left again to cross the road between the motorcars and omnibuses that steamed through – and on the other side, the tall, gothic spire of the cross rose like a spike into the night sky, pale-cast and weathered greyish.

The curtains closed, he laid the suitcase on its side on the floor, unclipping the clasps with two clicks one after another – a springing da-dum – and pulled out a map, laying it out and smoothing the creases down to study it.

Here, this was where he was, he knew: north of the river, near Charing Cross station (that was where the cross was; built to mourn a dead woman by her living husband); across the roundabout with the statue of the king and slightly to the left lay Whitehall with the Muggle Prime Minister and the horse guards in red jackets and plumed helmets. The Admiralty buildings, a group of houses and offices and richly decorated war-rooms, lay between Whitehall and The Mall.

And somewhere, somewhere within them, were the _Dreadnought_ plans.

Pulling a brown-bound notebook out of a slim leather folder in the lid of the suitcase, he tugged a crumpled feather quill from a pocket and, dipping it in a small jar of dark blue ink, wrote carefully from memory on the first, blank page: _Revelio_.

There was a shudder as the spell worked, the ink slowly sinking into the page as it swallowed the letters and spat out some others, emerging steadily, sleepily almost and faint in the dim light.

31B Ballam Street, Greenwich, London – Mr Albus Dumbledore.


	2. Licence To Kill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People could be shouting after Henry Potter for all sorts of reasons, he supposed. Perhaps he had run off with the wrong gloves after a lunchtime cigar.

Licence To Kill

URGENT STOP TO MY DEAR FRIEND ALBERT STOP HAVE LOCATED OUR FATHER’S COUSIN STOP AM HOPING TO MEET FOR COFFEE AT A LATER DATE STOP HAVE NOT MET OUR NEW FRIEND YET STOP WILL SEND MORE NEWS SOON STOP YOURS STOP R

Date: 22 SEPTEMBER 1905

Time Received: 0500 HOURS

To: TIERGARTEN, BERLIN

From: [REDACTED]

Translation: OUR OLD AGENT IN LONDON HAS IDENTIFIED THE BRITISH AGENT INSTRUCTED TO PROTECT THE DREADNOUGHT PLANS AND IS FORMULATING A PLAN OF ATTACK. HOWEVER HAS BEEN UNSUCCESSFUL AT LOCATING OUR NEW AGENT.

PASS TO THE KAISER IMMEDIATELY. NO RESPONSE REQUIRED.

* * *

23 SEPTEMBER 1905 AT 1100 HOURS

Soft and sibilant, the rustling of paper-on-paper snaked its way through the room, a gentle counterpoint to coughs and the screeching scrape of chair legs on the smooth wooden floors; the quiet was lullaby-like, soothing and warm and bathed in a gold-tinted light as it flooded through the small, arched library windows onto the dark wood shelves, neatly filled with leather-bound books and piles and piles of scrolls of parchment, shaped like fallen pyramids and wobblingly unbalanced. Shadows, long and thin, stretched themselves out over the floorboards, though the sunlight had little room to grow, swallowed eagerly up by the bookcases and desks and stiff-backed chairs.

It was dim and quiet and that, that was a blessing he had not been expecting: his head still hurt, aching with the remnants of a quick, damp fever, but it was better here than in the house.

_Tante_ Hilde always grew a strange, solemn sympathy whenever she saw him in the aftermath of a vision – she would talk to him in a small, tender voice, like a child or a doctor’s patient, and he would read the worry on her face and her insatiable wish to help and prefer to hide in his room pretending to sleep.

Here, in the library, he could sit on a brown-painted window-ledge, with a dust-covered book on his lap, its spine cracked with age, and his head on the glass, cool despite the sun, and just watch: watch the man in a funny black gown stride across the lawn with a briefcase in hand; watch a pair of magpies in the light-leafed tree nearby flutter and hop and prance down a branch, along a branch, down and down and along and along – a game of chase-me, kiss-me. A little further away, a group of students in a variety of muggle suits and wizarding robes set out down one of the gravel paths that cut across the grass, the muffled echo of far-off laughter reaching him through the window.

As the wind blew stronger, he watched how the leaves on the trees rippled; his headache spiked and he saw crumpled, sucked-dry leaves swaying to the ground, bare twigs shuddering as a storm lashed down, pale-white blossom bursting open from tiny, puckered buds – and then leaves again, just leaves; he blinked to be certain and _ja_ , _ja_ , just leaves again.

Restless and tired and thrumming with excitement, he shifted on the windowsill; he curled his spine back and then forward, like a cat hissing, and sighed as his muscles creaked longer.

“Ahem, I say,” a voice said nearby – tentative and far, far too apologetic – and he turned his head to look at the newcomer. He was a man, this newcomer, though not much older than him, with a thick mane of brown hair, glossy and stringy and slicked firm with gel; he had a trio of books in hand and a bag over his shoulder, while his wand handle was sticking out of his pocket.

“Your wand is going to fall out of your pocket,” he told the newcomer – it was not a compulsion, not at all, he did not have those kinds of compulsions, he was not that kind of Seer, but it was an easy excuse to be as blunt as he liked and it was only a little white lie; nothing God would not forgive.

“Is it?” the newcomer frowned, dropping the books on the table with a thump – ah, now, that hurt and he flinched a bit as the force of it echoed up through the wall, making the glass window-panes twitch in their sockets – and looking down, only to find that the handle of his bag was slipping down his arm. “Oh Christ…” he trailed off; the strap fell onto his hand, bending it sharply down, the bag itself clattering to the floor in a crash of broken ink bottles and chipped quill-nibs, and the wand, the wand spun through the air in a series of cartwheels and landed one-and-a-half feet or so away from the window.

Slowly and steadily, a pool of meshing, blurring ink spread out from underneath the heap where the bag lay, coating the sides and the strap. A kaleidoscope thing of watery cobalt blue-emerald green-cherry red-buttercup yellow-jet black, it sank into the cracks of the wooden floors.

It was so sad and so childish and full of too much _schadenfreude_ to be friendly, but he laughed, quiet and clear and delighted.

He imagined it drip-drip-dripping on the head of a bald professor from his white-plaster ceiling, imagined the student he was lecturing biting their lip and wide-eyed to avoid laughing, imaging the bald professor tilting his head back to look at what was so funny and a drop of rainbow ink, watered and wet, dropping straight into an exposed, brown-fringed eye.

At that, he laughed a little more and so what if it was his own joke? The world would never know.

“Oh god,” the newcomer breathed, staring at the puddle by his feet as it grew in the gentle, methodical way puddles grow, raising a hand to run it through his hair before it dropped, bounced off by the hardened gel. “Don’t suppose you could –”

He had already thought of that: the newcomer’s wand was in his hand with a negligent wave. Turning it from tip to base, he examined it thoroughly: calculating the length, testing how springy it was – it was hazel, he thought, with a unicorn hair core.

Even with it lying on his palm, rolling between his fingers, he could feel the newcomer’s wand pushing him away, like a child kicking and screaming and biting at hands trying to clean the grazes on his legs.

“Your wand does not like me,” he commented idly, swishing it through the air with a murmured _lumos_ , and seeing nothing – less than nothing: the failure felt like an absence of light, however expected it had been.

“Give me back my wand,” the newcomer said and there was an edge to his voice now – it was strained and it was nervously polite, but it was still an edge.

“In England you all buy your wands from Ollivanders, _ja_?” he asked, trailing the wandtip through the air, coaxing it gently, sweetly – but still. Nothing.

_Verdammt._

“Well, yes, but I don’t really –” the newcomer frowned, his mouth creasing to one side. His head followed every lazy, languid sweep of the wand through the air, like a cat fixated on its prey. “Please just give it back.”

“I am only looking,” he rolled his eyes, tracing patterns on the rippled window-glass with the wandtip, leaving searing, scratching scars behind, sticky and sharp and spider-legged things.

Oh, but there: a dipping ginger-cast head, grey pinstripe suit, flashy moon-ticking watch – unexpected but delightful, very very delightful.

He slipped off the windowsill with a little wiggle of his hips and a small, jumping twitch. Stepping forwards with a slight bow, he flipped the wand over back to the newcomer.

“Don’t worry,” he said as he passed. “I promise not to tell the librarian about the ink. Or the graffiti,” he added as he sauntered off, tucking the book under his arm and clipping, quickly and smartly, down the corridor and the stairs and through the next corridor to collide, neatly and just-about-in-time with Dumbledore.

“Ah yes,” Dumbledore said, watching him with a bright blue stare. “Mr Grindelwald, isn’t it? Bathilda’s nephew?”

He did not like any of that sentence, he decided. It reminded him forcibly of teachers and school; that faintly wary tone that said, _I think you should be in trouble but I cannot yet say why_.

What was worst was the suggestion that Dumbledore had barely remembered him – and that was a shame: he very much wanted to be memorable to Dumbledore. Very memorable, in fact. Pleasantly memorable.

“I am not keeping you from anything?” he asked, tilting his head a little to one side and adjusting his grip on the book under his arm.

Dumbledore glanced upwards, to the corner of the ceiling, as though he could see through the wooden beams and the cream-brushed plaster to the floor of the library and the creaking clacks of heels on floorboards.

“I – that is to say, not at all,” he replied after a slight hesitation. “Were you on your way somewhere?”

“No, nowhere,” he smiled then. “Though it is a good day to sit outside and read – perhaps the sun will bake me into clay and I will not have to attend this afternoon’s lecture? Or perhaps I will fall asleep under a tree and miss it? Or perhaps my book will be stolen and I will have to chase the perpetrator to get it back, fight a fierce duel and only return home at sunset?”

Dumbledore laughed: clear and soft and low; he smiled wider, sunnier.

“Perhaps you might like to accompany me for some coffee, so as to ensure you do not fall victim to any of those cruelties? Though I warn you, you may end up attending this afternoon’s lecture!”

How lovely. How perfectly, perfectly lovely.

“We shall see yet, Mr Dumbledore,” he commented idly, brushing past his arm to stand in the sunlit arch of the doorway, golden-white and fierce. “The lecture has not won until the final bell strikes!”

* * *

24 SEPTEMBER 1905 AT 1600 HOURS

The low wall was brick, spotted with white-splashed bird droppings and smears of soot, dark and greyish which scrubbed into fingers and the grains of wool trousers. It was, however, the only available place to sit on this Belgravia street, surrounded by other men, suit-clad and flat-hatted, sitting and smoking or sitting and eating, sipping every now and then from innocuous-looking flasks fished out of pockets before being hastily tucked away as a policeman, tall hat peering over the heads of passers-by vanishing round the corner, approached, hands behind his back and cordially nodding.

They resembled pigeons, these English policemen, he thought as he sat there, watching them bob and bob and bob by out of the corner of his eye as he read today’s copy of the _Daily Prophet_.

It was, he considered as he read slowly through the day’s top stories, a true skill in how English journalists could take absolutely nothing whatsoever and turn it, through a kind of magic, into something – not anything serious, but something all the same.

Why they did it, he could not say. Perhaps they were bored? Perhaps it was dull reading about the trials and tribulations of running an empire: the revolts, the uprisings, the unfortunate business of incarcerating people in camps as they fled violence you had started. Perhaps they simply found what quick-witted and often bizarre insults the Minister of Magic had called the Head of the Department of Magical Transportation more intriguing?

The fob watch in his waistcoat showed it was nearing ten past; his man was late.

Across the road, a short, slick-dressed man strode along the pavement, grey-gloved and bowler-hatted on top of a head of thick, unruly dark hair. He watched from behind the paper in a series of quick-quick glances as the man approached the road, looked left then right and then crossed with a half-jogging pace, ignoring the shouts of disgruntled drivers as they raced past.

Now that was a face he recognised: Henry Potter, a distinguished politician, Wizengamot member and, Berlin were fairly certain, either a former or current agent.

The line between former and current was always such a blurred thing, he thought, studying Potter closely out of the corner of his eye.

Crossing in front of him, Potter went by with a brisk walk, frowning as he went; there was a shout from behind for him, ‘Ah, Henry!’, but he did not seem to hear, continuing his way and vanishing round the corner in a matter of seconds.

On the wall, he kept his eyes fixed firmly on his paper, turning the page and his head as he did so – looking to the side and then down to the bottom-right-hand corner and ruffling the pages a little as though he could not find the edge of it – but there was no one there running after, no one there shouting or waving madly.

The disappointment stung – though he supposed he had not really been expecting anything to come from it. People could be shouting after Henry Potter for all sorts of reasons, he supposed. Perhaps he had run off with the wrong gloves after a lunchtime cigar.

“Excuse me,” a voice asked, polite and a little reedy, as though the owner rarely used it. It was the kind of voice which did not seem capable of sounding anything other than patient and calm and evenly-spaced. “May I sit here? No, no, no need to move too much, young man, thank you. My carriage is expected shortly, but my legs aren’t what they used to be. Much obliged, thank you.”

He shifted on the wall, a notice-me-not charm slipping from his tongue as slick as silk and with the smallest flash of soft, white-cold light, like the sun winking off metal – a fob-watch perhaps, or a monocle tucked into a breast pocket?

A briefcase slid along the wall under his legs to his left in a shuddering sort of jump and he shuffled his paper; finally, he had reached the sports section – a shame that QC Monschau had not made it to the European cup this season: North-Rhine Westphalia was a fine region for Quidditch, producing some excellent players, and he never much liked having to support a non-Prussian team, regardless of their shared German identity. 

* * *

25 SEPTEMBER 1905 AT 1900 HOURS

Tucked a street back from the bustling busy-ness of the Strand, the restaurant was a soft swell of murmurs as people chatted quietly, laughing in bubbling waves; champagne corks popped and wine glugged out of bottle-necks as cigarettes and cigars flared with orange-dim bursts. With the red-panelled walls and the gleaming chestnut wood, the candlelight reflected back berry-full and shadowed, leaving the room faintly hazy and lazy.

Waiters weaved through the tables in white shirtsleeves and smooth, velvet waistcoats, bearing cocktails which never spilled and plates of food somehow fitting neatly next to each other in trays which at first glance and then second looked far too small; it was a semi-magical place, as most places were, though he supposed the magic here was much money as it was actual, spell-cast magic.

In the background, a piano tinkled along somewhere, the keys clattering in a gentle, melodic tune he did not recognise, and he found himself searching for it when it was lost underneath the chink of glasses and the low buzz of the waiter’s voice at a nearby table – it was easy enough to pick up, to follow the strain of it once he had caught it.

Music, he was quite certain, was a magic all of its own and one, alas, he would never be able to grasp.

“I do recommend the oysters, if you are so inclined,” Dippet advised, having already closed his menu and now perusing the wine list. “Though they are a rather acquired taste, I must admit.”

Ah yes, he had almost forgotten about the food; the piano music was fading now, or perhaps it was simply less noticeable now he was not focusing on finding it, picking it up and following it like a man trapped in a maze.

“So, I suppose the immediate question,” Dippet began, resting his linked hands on the edge of the table. “Is how much further you are able to go with your thesis without needing to perform any physical experiments. After all, that will determine something of a timeframe for us to work within.”

After a moment longer, he closed his own menu in turn and set it down between the carefully laid-out knives and forks, all silver and glinting with a dull, dark gleam.

“There are still some elements to be improved on,” he replied carefully, leafing through the pages of his recent work in his mind. “But I think, if I am entirely honest, I am coming close to the limit of what I can decipher without actually conducting any experiments whatsoever and while I am not averse to conducting small experiments on my own –”

“Albus, dear boy, you cannot propose that you experiment in your rooms,” Dippet’s lips quirked – fond and exasperated in equal measure. “Let alone your house in London. I know more than most how capable a wizard you are but this is not a question of capability but sensibility.”

It was so often hard to tell when one was being rebuked by Dippet, he reflected, because Dippet’s tone simply never varied; though he had heard enough rebukes to know that that was one.

In his defence, he had not set the curtains of his room on fire while conducting an experiment. It had been something entirely else and probably, in truth, far less dangerous and far more stupid.

“May I take your orders, sirs?” the waiter appeared almost out of nowhere, hands behind his back and eyes flicking between the two of them.

“Yes, the pork belly for me, thank you,” Dippet said with a smile.

“I will have the monkfish, please,” Albus added, meeting the waiter’s eyes as he nodded and whipped the menu out from in front of him.

“Very good, sir, and to drink?” the waiter asked, and this time, he did not look at Albus at all.

“A bottle of the Château Puech-Haut rosé, for the table,” Dippet said, and the waiter nodded a third time, a snap of his fingers sending the menus and the wine list zipping away through the air in a snaking trail to slot themselves into a shelf full of leather-bound menus.

“Of course, sir,” the waiter replied, stepping back and away to another pair of diners and handing them menus with a twisting flourish of his fingers.

There was a moment of quiet, easy and sprinkled with the tumbling piano-keys and the low hum of other voices, faded into a pleasant, background buzz; for his part, he leaned back in his chair and concentrated on the stillness of his hands – he had never quite been comfortable in places like this, wealthy and opulent and which seemed to pick out so simply all the ways in which he was not English enough, and he could never be bothered to spend too much time deciding whether it was all in his head or if it was all real (but then, weren’t they so often the same?).

The waiter returned, the bottle already nestled in a bucket of enchanted ice cubes, chipped into perfect spheres of cold-white, and presented it before unwrapping and pouring it with a tip of his arm into the two wine glasses in a splashing fall of clear-cut pink.

Dippet watched sideways and smiling a little as the waiter retreated, taking a sip of his wine, before he spoke again.

“I heard from one of our friends the other day,” he commented, putting the glass back down on the table with a soft thunk swallowed up by the restaurant. “It seems he is not entirely trusted by his father to go about this business alone – a shame, to be honest, as it does make things rather more difficult for us.”

“Much more difficult for him, I should think,” Albus murmured, giving voice to a thought he was certain they had both had. “After all, one does not exactly send a second son abroad solely for business – any clerk could account for that.”

“At this stage,” Dippet said gently, and there was an edge of steel in the words. “That is not our concern. Our concern rests with the brother now – the elder son is known to us, but this second one is not.”

Now that was odd – and more than a little intriguing; on his tongue the rosé tasted sharp, stinging almost at the back of his throat, traces of wild roses and the hot French sun.

“We had thought that you would be the ideal man to host them both,” Dippet continued, and if the smile stayed on his face, it was a little more fixed now, a little more stony. “The younger brother is close to your age and also a university man, much like yourself, so you will have something in common if all else fails.”

He took a breath and nodded, studying how the light bent through the wine, catching threads of reddish-gold and little beads of dark-white on the side of it. It was chilled to the touch but charmed smooth and free of damp on the outside; the oil from his fingertips smudged in small specks here and there.

“Of course,” he accepted slowly; it felt heavy and he painted a convivial smile into his voice. He had always been talented at deception. “What do we know about him?”

“Prussian, like his brother, naturally,” Dippet told him, holding his wine glass in mid-air as he thought, a frown pinching his face. That, too, was unusual.

More and more intriguing.

“Very clever – talented, no doubt,” Dippet added. “Though it seems he keeps himself to himself – quite a secretive young man – and highly regarded. Apparently, he is notable for his skills in Transfiguration.”

That at least made some sense – though it would also make it more difficult. Self-Transfiguration was a delicate art, but a fascinating and almost undetectable one when executed properly.

It had been a long time since he had had quite a difficult mission; he could feel his heartbeat quickening and a smile twitched at his lips without him meaning to. How very exciting, indeed.

“I will, of course, do my best,” he assured Dippet – perfectly in time as it turned out, as the waiter arrived back to slip two plates off a small, hand-held tray and deposit them in front of them with the sweeping phrase ‘bon appetit!’.

He could not help turning over all this sparse information about the new agent – younger brother, as they said; the new second brother – in his head and as it tumbled, like little wooden blocks bumping against each other, it bumped and bumbled and jostled into the rose-gold of the Deathly Hallows necklace and the rich, dark brown of Mr Grindelwald’s coffee as they sat in the café of King’s College, wisps of steam rising from the surface in twirling twists of translucent white, curling like his hair around fingers tangled…

Would he like this kind of place – this kind of suave, sleek, shining restaurant? Every man ought to visit London when he came to England, really, it was almost a right of passage – and the Portkey terminal was hardly much of anywhere; they were the same the world over, Portkey hubs: London, Paris, Berlin, New York – all the same, bright-white stone and silver-steel security gates.

It would be nothing serious, he was sure, merely – what was it Gell – Mr Grindelwald had said? – a pretty distraction.

And he really was remarkably pretty.

Of course, it would be easier to hunt down this new agent from the inside and a friendship with a German exchange student – albeit one studying Divination of all things, and political history – could make that much, much quicker.

And if nothing came of it, well, then he would have spent several hours making a handsome man laugh and that would be enough on its own.


	3. Moonraker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was a scene meant to pretend to be an accident while smiling, shark-like, and telling you plainly that it wasn’t.

Moonraker

URGENT STOP TO MY DEAR FRIEND GEORGE STOP EVERYTHING IS QUITE ALL RIGHT STOP WILL TAKE GOOD CARE OF AUNT ARAMINTA’S JEWELS STOP WILL RETURN AS SOON AS SEASON IS OVER STOP YOURS STOP A

Date: 03 OCTOBER 1905

Time Received: 2300 HOURS

To: WHITEHALL, LONDON

From: [REDACTED]

Translation: THE SELECTED AGENT HAS SECURED THE DREADNOUGHT PLANS. THEY WILL BE RETURNED AS SOON AS THE DANGER HAS PASSED.

PASS TO CABINET IMMEDIATELY. NO RESPONSE REQUIRED.

* * *

04 OCTOBER 1905 AT 1100 HOURS

The park was quiet: to be expected, really, with the downpour which had only just started, leaving people fleeing under cover even as a sea of bowler hats and bobbing, blue-tinted umbrella charms sprouted like moonflowers blossoming in a shuddering ripple when the clouds cleared. Here and there a hardy soul kept walking, dog at heel and gloved hands linked gently behind their backs, utterly unbothered by the rain thundering down around them.

It was, Albus reflected, almost something Biblical – the way it had turned in a blink from bright, cloud-white skies to a smothering, looming gloom which dyed everything and everyone greyish and dull, as though they had all been drowned and were floating, heavy and cold, on the bottom of the seabed, breathing out bubbles in gulping gloops.

“Weather for ducks,” Henry Potter commiserated as they strolled along the path, heading up towards the back of the park, the sound of their footsteps lost under the drumming rain.

“I should hope not solely for ducks,” Albus commented lightly, spying a sparrow buffing its head with its wing high up in a chestnut tree. “As that would put us in quite a pickle.”

“Well then, weather for ducks and the dubious,” Henry amended with a grin in his voice. “How is the university life these days?”

“Dusty, primarily,” he responded idly. “Though the research is as engrossing as ever and I find myself almost more reluctant to leave now I am starting to get closer to beginning the real experimentation – though that is, of course, still a sticky point over the issue of safety which I find the university is remarkably reluctant to – oh, I am sorry,” he broke off with a small, huffing smile as Henry started laughing, quiet and bubbled with curved, shaking shoulders. “Ah, I mean, it is quite fascinating still.”

“Well, if you ever change your mind about keeping yourself cooped up with Dippet and his white-haired gang of thieves, let me know,” Henry said cheerfully. “I am always looking for talented young men like yourself – and there seem to be far too few of them about these days.”

“That, my dear Henry, is simply age,” Albus smiled serenely, as they turned and started up towards the hill and the white-marbled dome of the Royal Observatory rising dripping and smeared with grey out of the rain.

“Yes, a truly devious nemesis,” Henry sighed, cheeks blowing red as the wind swept the rain down the hillside, buffeting at their faces and stomachs and legs. “Much like this younger son we need to find, I’m afraid. Damned if we can find any more out about him.”

“Can our man in the family help?” Albus frowned; it was unusual to know absolutely nothing. Looking for a Prussian man studying at Cambridge was, well, a bit like looking for a bowler in a cricket team. They were everywhere.

“We are not certain he can without compromising his own position,” Henry said grimly. “It seems he was not informed about a second agent being sent – and has not been given any further information about who he is or how he is expected to link up with him.

“The feeling from the top is that we must treat them as separate threats and respond accordingly,” he added. “Regardless of whether any actions which we take in response have, er, political ramifications.”

“Of course,” Albus nodded, glancing up at the sky through the silver-spun cover of his umbrella charm, spotted with dots like stars in a constellation – it was, in fact, if anyone took the time to notice, the constellation of Leo – and seeing how the clouds banked on the horizon, bunching up around each other, bulging with plump, rain-filled bumps, grey and heavy and dark.

If he turned around, he imagined the city would be drowning under showers of rain, thick and light-hearted and setting all the colours to run like a jug tipped over a watercolour, smudged and smeared and almost unrecognisable.

They were nearly at the top of the hill now; a blessing, as the backs of his legs were starting to ache a little – the penalty for the laziness of academics and wizards with valid Apparition licences, he thought – and the Observatory loomed greyscale in front of them, tall and spotted with black-hatted men and women and children in small, half-untucked shirts with messy, soaked hair.

“You should know,” Henry said after a pause, and his voice was low and urgent and he stopped still so Albus had to stop, turn and look at him. His face was friendly enough: serious and stern but tipped up at the edges into the tiniest of smiles; but he stood still and stiff, a hand clenched behind his back. “It would be war if they got hold of them. Cabinet and the Ministry are both certain on that front. We were not sure before but the conversations have been had and the agreements have been made. Nothing in writing of course, but they shook on it so it’s as good as.

“So, no pressure,” he smiled with half a grimace. “But we cannot afford to fail.”

“I will do my best, as I have said,” Albus said softly, looking out over Henry’s head at the London skyline: St Paul’s Cathedral off to the left, a faint white-cast semicircle, and the twin-tower blocks of Tower Bridge, square and squat-looking, and in between them the mess of houses and offices and spiking church spires filled with iron bells and green-collared pigeons.

“Well, we’re in good hands, then,” Henry’s smile was real, then: small but real. “Unless the Germans happen to have found your doppelganger!”

* * *

04 OCTOBER 1905 AT 1600 HOURS

He walked quickly: hands enveloped in leather gloves and scarf wrapped tightly around his neck, his head hatless but covered neatly by a blue-lit umbrella charm which he held in his right hand, wandtip to the sky.

It had not stopped raining all day – it had been a constant drumming, drum-drum-drumming since the moment he woke up – and he was growing tired already of the bleak, grey-ness of the weather. London, so far, was entirely what he had expected and entirely nothing he liked.

All around him, students dashed through the rain on bicycles, books stacked haphazardly in baskets slung over the handlebars or tucked under jackets; a couple of young women swooped overhead on broomsticks, already dressed in Quidditch gear – light-blue robes emblazoned with shimmering gold numbers on the back, numbers twisting along muscles and glittering in the rain. They shouted to each other something inaudible under the rain, but their laughter carried through, whooping-loud and gleeful. An elderly man with a neat top hat fussed in a doorway with a black-veined umbrella, muttering and thwacking the umbrella against the wooden posts of the door and shaking it with a peering, squinting frown.

He slipped past them all, just another face in the crowd: someone eyes slip over, already moving on to the next person before you even realise you saw him.

Cambridge was a prettier city than London: smaller, sweeter, the buildings in red-stone and warm, Tuscan yellow, buried under less soot and less grime; weaving its way over the river through its heart with a succession of bridges, stone and wood and old and new. There was a slower pace to it: a slower heart-beat, even then as people rushed about to get out of the rain – people smiled, people laughed, people stopped to speak to each other on the street, lingering over pleasantries and small-talk about _isn’t the rain just awful_ , and _have you heard from Marjorie recently_.

There were birds – not pigeons, either, other birds, black and brown and with small spotted wings – twittering in the trees, flicking water off their wings, and somewhere nearby dogs were barking, deep-throated growls and a series of high-pitched yaps.

Clare College was an old building, with arched wooden doors, carved and dotted with rusting metal studs, kept away from the outside world with its bicycles and dogs and half-jogging passers-by by tall, round-topped walls, stained here and there with green-headed moss and thin, climbing vines.

A couple of students – older students, a man carrying a covered basket and a woman wearing a smart, blue-pinstriped suit jacket – were ducking inside the entrance (Porter’s Lodge, it said just inside the door and he glanced it once before not again) and he followed in behind them, sneaking in just when the porter, a grey-haired man with broad shoulders and a cracked jaw, looked back down at his desk again and the book propped up in front of him.

The garden was lovely, covered in flowers and lush green grass, the paving stones carving a path around the edge and across the centre of it in a cobble-stone cross drenched in water dripping off into the verge; it was a wide space, cramped with roses and purple peonies in beds around flat squares of grass.

He did not look at it though; he was looking for something specific.

“Excuse me,” he caught a young woman – small and squat and pretty, with a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks and a smart-cut bob – as she passed by, pulling the collar of her coat around her neck. “I have a meeting with the Master – do you know which way his office is?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” she said with a blink and a swish of her hair. “It’s just through that door, down the corridor and on the right. You won’t miss it – there is a plaque on the door.”

She left then, all business and ambition, vanishing without a smile and another word.

He appreciated that; but then there was a tired English joke about German bluntness.

So: through the indicated door, down the corridor – there was no one around yet; not a sound of people at all – and then on the landing, he paused for a moment wondering left or right, but there was the sign she had mentioned, gleaming with gold-painted letters on a stiff, oak background.

Quick and confident, he walked down the hallway, grabbed the door handle and twisted it, his shoulder to the door to push it slick and small so he could slip inside, closing it behind him with a click and a creak.

He turned to look and stopped, something curdling in his stomach like off-cream, sour and spitting and bubbling-sick.

The floor was littered with tiny, needle-shaped shards of glass, scattering out from the broken window, the fractured remains still clinging to the sides of it like chipped teeth; the chair was pushed back from the table, off at an angle, the drawers pressed in too neatly, too tidily. On the desk, the papers were messed, sprayed about the long table as though they had been buffeted by the wind; a bottle of ink had been upended, a spiked crack running down one side of it from top-to-bottom, leaving a puddle of red-bright liquid seeping along the veins in the wood.

To any other person, the cricket ball lying in the middle of the floor, crimson-ink smudging over the imprint of the lion on the red-leather, would seem the truth, seem obvious – someone had played cricket in the courtyard, smashed the ball through the window and ran away without collecting the ball.

Only – it had been raining all day and there was no water on the papers it would have bounced across: no splotches where it had bounced, soaked and glistening into the stack and off again, rolling to a halt in the middle of the floor.

No, the papers had been rifled through; someone had been looking for something – searching for something.

It was a scene meant to pretend to be an accident while smiling, shark-like, and telling you plainly that it wasn’t.

The thought seized at him; his heart skipped and he stepped into the room, running his eyes over everything but touching nothing, skirting round the ball in the middle of the floor and heading to the desk. He glanced over the papers on the desk: academic papers mostly, articles and magazines and student dissertations on the uses of wolfsbane or the application of the moon cycle to picking datura flowers, white and heavy-scented.

Nothing.

The handles of the drawers, brass and scratched, gleamed with fresh coats of polish.

With a small twitch of his hand, he opened the drawers, one after another after another after another until all eight ordinary drawers and the ninth, hidden drawer in the centre of the desk above where the sitter’s legs would rest were all open.

Files, yes; student files, yes; contact information linking him to high-ranking members of the British Ministry, yes; personal correspondence files with the Minister of Magic, among others, but limited to dinner invitations and tickets to Quidditch matches and ballet performances, yes: nothing, nothing, nothing.

_Schei_ _ße_.

Whatever was here, it was gone. Whoever had been here first had taken it.

How would he report this?

* * *

05 OCTOBER 1905 AT 2300 HOURS

The rain was glorious: it bounced with an echo off the pavement in plopping drops which splashed up onto boots and trouser-cuffs; it hammered on umbrella-charms, tipping off in a waterfall of translucently opaque green-tinted white; it shattered the surface of the Thames, breaking it into tiny, tiny jigsaw pieces which glinted green-blue-grey like snakeskin and winked up at him with a thousand and one eyes. In the dark it was cold, the rain, cold and biting with sharp, nipping teeth – it seemed to fall from nowhere, from a dark-black sky, moonless and starless, studded only by the occasional orange-cast glow from streetlights along the towpath and the smog-fogged city lights behind them as they strolled, slow and steady and tremulously uncertain.

It smelled of saltwater, the air and the side: saltwater and rain and the whiff of smoke from their jackets, from their fingers – a cigarette before dinner, each, and then two shared afterwards, a little flirtatious, a little childishly demanding to say _I have run out_ and _I cannot ask to take one from you, but perhaps if we shared?_

He had noticed, though, how Dumbledore – _Albus_ , he had said, once it was over and the cigarette had been stubbed out on the wall next to them and vanished, _call me Albus_ – had watched him when he leaned in to take a puff of the cigarette, breathing out in a gush of white breath, his hand curving around Albus’ arm. He had tracked him, tracked the cigarette to his mouth and watched his mouth afterwards – and Gellert had thought he would kiss him then; and oh, it had been a long time since he had been mistaken.

So when Albus had said, “would you like a walk?”, looking at him too intently, too seriously, he had smiled and let him lead the way, a sweet restlessness coiling in his stomach as he waited, waited for something more.

Or perhaps it was different in England – perhaps they flirted differently? Perhaps it was only a walk, nothing more; perhaps Gellert would have to push, to step closer, to take the chance.

He was good at chance; it came naturally to him.

“Does it often rain like this?” he asked, idle and soft, holding a hand out from underneath his umbrella charm, a strand-less dome hovering over his head in a silver-slick shield. The rain battered off his hand, smacking into his skin in cold, circular drops, leaving trails on the back of his hand and across his palm; he could turn it over and watch it run before dropping down, down onto the pavement in quick-plopping trips.

“Not quite like this,” Albus commented, watching him again – and god, Gellert liked the way Albus watched him; there was something careful about it, as though he was never sure what he would do, as though he wanted to log every movement he made, and it set something in Gellert’s chest to stretching and prowling. “But it does rain a lot, I’m afraid.”

Gellert hummed something in response – a trio of notes, rising and falling again – closing his hand into a fist and watching how the rain thudded into his knuckles and running down his wrist in long strings of water, wetting the cuff of his shirt and his coat.

It was cold; it made him shiver, head-to-toe, down his spine, vertebrae-by-vertebrae.

He thought of snow falling in soft, wet waves; a shirt buttoned up wrong and a coat abandoned on a table, burning in a flash of blue-dark wool; he felt it, in his chest, a clinical-calm blankness as something metallic slipped through his palm.

The bang was loud in his head and he stumbled, catching himself – no, being caught instead: a hand on his arm, gripping tight and steady, another grazing his waist with a careful, decent kind of caress to pull him upright. The hands stayed and he could feel, believed he could feel, Albus’ breath close to his ear, puffing out in white-grey clouds like wine-flavoured smoke.

“You should sit down,” Albus said, warm hands and warm breath and warm worry lacing through his voice – and a to-still tremor of something else.

“I will be fine in a minute,” he heard himself say; his lips moved to form the words, but all he could feel was stone from shoulder to hip and metal against his palms, curling and wrapping around – stiffening in the night air, brisk and seeping through the broken window. There was something red, too, red in the corner and a sting in his arm – no his wrist; no an ache in his legs and a hammering in his heart and a panic in his head which made him gasp, shallow and quick and too-quick.

He clutched at the arm holding him; there was something there: a low murmuring and then a snap and a crackling as wood popped and spat sparks up, up, up into the chimney, and he was leaning on the wooden frame of a door, blue eyes and red hair and the yellow-orange of the fire growing taller and taller.

At the back of his throat, he could taste something copper-ish, metallic and slickly dry.

He swallowed, tipping his head back to rest against the doorframe, reaching to lay a hand on Albus’ arm, gripping briefly before letting go – but not moving, god, not moving.

“ _Entschuldigung_ ,” he rasped; swallowing thickly, he frowned with a wince – water, he needed water. “You should not have seen that – it is rare that it is that bad.”

“You said,” Albus said slowly, with a deliberate, cautious step; like a man walking through a pack of wolves. “You were studying Divination at university.”

Gellert looked at him, a spike of a spiteful, hateful irritation lancing through him. He was used to this: to people who prided them on their scientific sensibilities looking once, twice and askance when they said, ‘oh, Seer?’; people who were so buried under their theories and their rubrics that they failed to see there was so much left outside of the lines, so much colour and wonder and so much left to discover.

He had thought Albus would be different – had thought that was what it had all meant: the signs, the certainty, that odd skip in his heartbeat and the knowing, instinctive and softly singing, that stretched whenever he saw him.

It would not be the first time he had been wrong; it would not be the last. But that did not mean it would not be painful in the here and now.

“And?” he asked sharply, digging his fingertips into Albus’ arm hard and sharp; if it hurt, Albus did not even blink. He dragged him closer – far closer than was normal, than was acceptable, than was _natural_.

Albus did not blink then either.

His eyes were steady, blue and fire-lit-glittering, and when he glanced down at Gellert’s mouth there was nothing subtle about it: it felt, Gellert thought, like being measured, as though Albus was taking notes in his head, cataloguing the way his bottom lip jutted out a little, or the curves of his top lip; and so when Albus kissed him, he was not expecting it.

Now this, _Gott_ , this was natural: Albus was warm against him, the doorframe a hard line down his back, bumping against his spine, and everything about this – the way he kissed, slow and thorough and almost filthy, was so familiar; he followed without thinking, anchoring a hand in Albus’ hair and losing himself again – he did not remember, was not sure he had ever known where they were or when they were, but they were here, in this moment, and he could float like this for as long as Albus wanted.

Tugging him forward, Albus slid an arm about his waist, firm and palming at his back, fingertips skimming lower, feeling out his hipbone even as he kissed him again, tangling fingers in his hair and – was the jerk now or then? It did not matter, really, all that mattered was that suddenly Gellert wanted, desperately, impossibly – and he hummed a whine as Albus pulled away, shoving at the jacket still on Albus’ shoulders; he wanted it off, wanted it all off: he could feel sheets on his skin, feel nothing on his skin, feel skin on his skin and a mouth pressing a bite into his neck, open and breathless and saying _yes_ , _yes_ , _yes_ …

“I would not have thought you would be this impatient,” Albus drawled in his ear, smug and just as wanting. His eyes were dark, his hands were moving, mapping out Gellert’s hips and the sides of his thighs, tying knots in his hair like a ribbon to keep them together.

Gellert undid his tie, then undid his own, dropping them both on the floor.

He meant the smile then to be dark, burning – a challenge as much as a promise – but it felt smaller than he had intended: shyer, a little more hesitant, and when he leaned in to kiss him again, he felt cold everywhere Albus did not touch him.

After all the kisses before, it was almost chaste: over too soon for Gellert and he frowned, eyes flickering fast over Albus’ face, but Albus only smiled back – sly and a little hungry and red-red-red – and laced their fingers together, simple and sweet and something twisted in his stomach with a gentle sigh.

And when Albus led him up the stairs, wordless and thoughtless, it was only too easy to follow.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a super self-indulgent Spy AU I was heavily convinced to write by two friends (they know who they are. And what they've done :P). It's a crazy, crazy historical AU, set in a blended magical/muggle world, with a heavy dose of romance, drama, a bit of mystery (I hope!), and a fair bit of silliness. It's not a serious, canon-compliant kinda story, in case you hadn't guessed :P Stuff is gonna get blown up, people are going to get murdered, guns will be used, the Hallows are still around, Antonio the Chupacabra may make an appearance (who knows?), Gellert will probably get arrested at some point. Albus will regret his life choices. Elphias will be very confused. All that good stuff :P Honestly, it's been fun to write as a kinda side-project to more serious canon-compliant stories, so I hope it's fun to read too :)


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